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Rabbi Yehudah ben Hanina was traveling through Rome when he learned that a Jewish child had been taken captive — a boy of remarkable beauty and already, in his young life, of remar...
A certain man in Jerusalem wanted to divorce his rich wife. The problem was that her marriage contract — her ketubah — stipulated a considerable sum to be paid to her in the event ...
Three quiet stories, each one about keeping Torah alive in a household. Rabbi Yehudah — the Prince, the redactor of the Mishnah — personally undertook the education of the daughter...
There was a man who lived in the Greek city of Laodicea, and he had a rule he followed every week of his life. Whenever he found some particularly fine food in the market — the bes...
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai lay dying. He had been one of the greatest of all the sages — the man who, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, had been smuggled out of the city in a coff...
Rabbi Akiva had a saying he repeated so often his disciples knew it by heart: Kol de'avid Rachmana letav avid — "Whatever the Merciful One does is done for the best." Once he was t...
The son of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai had fallen dangerously ill. His father, the greatest sage of his generation, prayed — and nothing happened. Yohanan then sent word to a strange,...
A Greek philosopher came to Rabban Gamliel with a complaint disguised as a question. "Why," he asked, "should I give to the poor with a smile? Giving drains my purse. A smile on to...
Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya instructed his son one morning to go out and make sure the Jewish workers hired for the day were fed well. "Feed them adequately," he said. "Do not cut corn...
A woman came to Rabbi Eliezer with a dream. She described what she had seen in the night. Rabbi Eliezer listened carefully and said: "You will bear a male child." In time, the woma...
The prophet Isaiah met King Hezekiah outside Jerusalem. The meeting was not a diplomatic visit. Isaiah carried a message from God: Hezekiah's children would do evil. Hezekiah did n...
A terrible famine had descended on the land. Grain was scarce. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi — the Prince, the compiler of the Mishnah, the richest and most influential sage of his generatio...
When Alexander of Macedon marched east, the Samaritans — called in the Talmud the Kutim — saw a political opening. They sent word to Alexander asking him to destroy the Temple in J...
Three men were traveling together through a lonely country. As Friday afternoon wore on, one of them stopped. "The sun is setting," he said. "I will not travel on Shabbat. I will s...
A man in a certain town buried a sum of money in his garden for safekeeping. He thought no one had seen. He was wrong. His neighbor, watching through a gap in the wall, waited a da...
There was once a pious scholar who left behind a son, Rabbi Isaac, greater in learning and piety than himself, and a dayyan — a judge in the Jewish court. On the eve of Rosh Hashan...
A poor man, unable to work, resolved to stay in his house and wait for God to provide. One day, when he had nothing at all to eat, a fat cow wandered through his open door. The man...
There was a man in a certain town who was always seen in tattered clothes. He sat on the synagogue floor among the poorest of the congregation. He ate what was given him. He accept...
The Torah says (Numbers 16) that Korah led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron, and that the earth opened and swallowed him. What the Torah does not say — what the midrash fills in...
Rabbi Beroka of Be Chozae had a gift. The prophet Elijah, the undying messenger, would sometimes appear to him in ordinary places — in a marketplace, among vendors and travelers — ...
A drought had settled on the land. The sages, running out of options, remembered the legend that Abba Hilkiah — the grandson of the famous rainmaker Honi ha-Me'aggel — had inherite...
A poor but pious man had three silver pieces — all he had in the world. He took them to the mill, bought flour for his household, and walked home carrying the sack. On the way, at ...
There is a brief, bruising story preserved in Gaster's Exempla (no. 294, 1924) about Rabbi Safra, a well-known legal scholar of the Babylonian tradition. One day he found himself a...
Rabbi Oshaia asked what the prophet meant when he wrote, "I took unto me two staves; the one I called Amiable and the other Destroyer" (Zechariah 11:7). The answer the sages offere...
The question of how oral tradition becomes binding is an old one, and the Talmud answers it with a scene in Solomon's court. Rav Yehudah, reporting in the name of Shmuel, taught th...
"And it came to pass, when Abram was come into Egypt" (Genesis 12:14). So the verse tells us, matter-of-factly. But where was Sarah? The midrash fills the silence. Abraham, knowing...
The First Temple, the sages taught, held five tokens of God's nearness that the Second Temple lacked: the Ark and its cover, the sacred fire that came down from heaven, the Shekhin...
When Boaz sent Ruth home in the early morning, he poured into her shawl "six measures of barley" (Ruth 3:15). The sages, reading closely, asked: can this really mean six grains, so...
The people of Israel once came before God with a complaint that only a working people could make. Rabbi Eliezer preserved their words: "We are anxious to be occupied day and night ...
Alexander of Macedon stopped, so the sages tell it, to test the elders of the Negev with ten hard questions. Some of their answers have come down to us, and they show a people conf...
There was a time, the sages taught, when the Divine Name of twelve letters was taught openly to anyone who came to learn. A student could carry it home the way he carried any other...
The twelfth blessing of the Amidah, the eighteen benedictions prayed three times daily, is known by its opening Hebrew word V'lamalshinim — "and for the slanderers." Its language i...
The sages taught that forty years before the Second Temple burned, its destruction had already begun to show in the quiet details only the priests could read. On Yom Kippur, the lo...
The wicked kingdom once sent two officers to the sages of Israel with a curious assignment: teach us your Torah. The manuscript was put into their hands, and three times over they ...
The sages counted two hundred and forty-eight limbs in the human body — the same number, they noted, as the positive commandments of the Torah. A curse, they taught, enters and exi...
In the old generations, the Talmud remembers, a Jew would not wear black shoes (Taanit 22a). Even in later centuries, in the Jewish towns of Poland, a chasid — a truly pious man — ...
The Torah tells the encounter briefly: Potiphar's wife caught Joseph by his cloak, and he fled. The midrash, unwilling to leave so fierce a struggle so thinly described, puts Psalm...
The Alexandria synagogue, the Talmud remembers, was so large that a cantor had to wave a flag when the congregation was meant to answer Amen — no human voice could carry from pulpi...
Rav Acha taught that before Adam was created, God turned to the ministering angels and consulted with them. "Shall we make man?" He asked. The angels answered honestly: "What good ...
No one in Israel, the sages taught, could humble himself more thoroughly than David when a commandment was at stake. Before God he spoke the words of Psalm 131, and the midrash tea...
Rabbi Achiya, the son of Abba, used to tell this story of a Sabbath he spent in the town of Ludik. He had been invited into the home of a wealthy man. The table was laid with a sum...
The anthologists of the old Hebraic literature gathered Talmudic aphorisms the way a peddler gathers buttons — many small, each perfect. A handful: The rivalry of scholars advances...
King David, lying on his couch one evening, let his thoughts wander through the corners of creation he could not make sense of. "Of what use is the spider in this world?" he asked ...
When Maimonides — Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known to Jewish tradition as the Rambam — fled the persecutions in Andalusia and reached the court of Egypt in the late twelfth century, t...
Abraham stepped out of the cave where he had been hidden as an infant, and for the first time saw the world above ground. He looked up and saw the sun climbing, enormous and warm, ...
The wicked kingdom once decreed that the Jews should no longer keep the Sabbath, nor circumcise their sons, nor observe the laws of ritual purity the Torah commands. Three commandm...
A Roman matrona once posed a sharp question to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta. "Your Bible says, 'He gives wisdom to the wise' (Daniel 2:21). But this makes no sense. A wise person already...
When the wicked kingdom destroyed the Temple and carried the people into slavery, the son and daughter of Rabbi Ishmael — both famous for their beauty — were seized and sold to dif...
